Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future that Disappeared by Andrew Brown
261pp, Granta, £16.99

Of the many forms of apparently pointless leisure activities devised by man, fishing has at least produced some decent literature. The only sensible thing to do with a book of reminiscences about golf, for example, is to thread some strong string down the spine and hang it on the hook in one of the mosquito-infested outside loos you can apparently still find north of the Arctic circle. Fishing, by contrast, has spawned some rather brilliant writers. There is even a small genre of confessional literature, such as Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis by the former New York Times editor Howell Raines, which deals with divorce and death as fishermen usually deal with them - by buggering off to the river, where the quiet concentration positively encourages introspection and thoughtfulness.

Although Fishing in Utopia contains some delicious passages about fishing ("the grayling has one superb extravagance - a long dorsal fin shot through with purple ... it seems as if the river were waving at you a banner made from the Northern Lights"), it does not belong in that school. Maybe it's the combination of English reticence and Swedish lugubriousness, but Andrew Brown gives us little of the emotional side of his life. Sex is entirely absent. Nor, mercifully, does he give us too much about the technical side of angling. Instead we have a beguiling account of one man's absorption in and by a country.

Brown spent much of his childhood in Sweden, married a Swedish woman and got a job there assembling wooden packing cases. Later he became a rather good journalist, got divorced, left the country, and then returned.

What's the proper adjective for a country whose greatest monuments are cars built like tanks and music that sounds like a mildly melodic lawn strimmer? Smug seems about right. Sweden may not have thrown up anyone quite as odious as Norway's little fascist Vidkun Quisling, but its so-called neutrality in the second world war gave the Nazis what they needed almost as easily. The Norwegians, whom I rather admire, spent the postwar years rebuilding their country and being patronised by the Swedes. Mind you, Sweden patronises almost everywhere. Thirty years ago the place at least had the reputation of being full of blonde nymphomaniacs. Now even they seem to have evaporated.

We might as well concede that part of the rest of the world's dislike of Sweden was simple jealousy. Thirty or 40 years ago, it seemed to manage effortlessly to have many of the things the rest of Europe could only dream about, notably an all-encompassing welfare state in which no one was properly poor any more and if you sneezed on the street a fleet of ambulances would draw up at once to speed you to hospital. By comparison with the well-toned Swedes, English people looked grey, lumpy and snaggle-toothed.

This all-encompassing system came at the price of an all-enveloping set of prejudices about the world. The Swedish state cared for its people, but some things - notably the right of the state to make judgments about the wellbeing of the individual - were simply not questioned. When liberals weren't shrugging their shoulders at how the country had achieved a welfare system that was the envy of most of the rest of Europe, apostles of the free market bridled at the price it exacted in restricting freedom.

Between then and now something happened, so that the country has undoubtedly become more interesting, if only in the way that listening to a domestic dispute in the next-door apartment becomes interesting. The rosy future has disappeared.

Brown tries to find out what went wrong by recalling what sounds to have been a pretty happy early married life on the edge of a poky town in the middle of nowhere, and then later by setting out on a journey into the far north of the country, trying to discover the old Sweden. He writes a terrific travelogue, capturing the grey light on the emptiness of the lakes, birch forests and bogs. The narrative is peppered with pithy observations and memorable characters.

The answers that he gives to the Swedish difficulty seem less clear, though. The world has blundered into this Nordic paradise. The great industries, such as the shipyards, have succumbed to the same forces that shut down their British counterparts. Very large numbers of outsiders have arrived - one in nine residents are immigrants, he says, and there seems to be hardly a town without a Kurdish-owned pizzeria. Well-intentioned laws designed to give job security have had precisely the reverse effect. The good intentions are still there, though, perfectly encapsulated in a remark he hears made by the woman serving as defence minister. When asked about rowdy behaviour by some of the country's young soldiers, she delivers herself of the wonderfully Swedish judgment: "We must stamp out the macho culture in the army."

The greatest embodiment of this civilised culture was the Social Democrat Olof Palme. Palme - anti-nuclear, anti-Vietnam, anti-apartheid - insisted upon living as ordinary a life as possible, and was shot dead walking home from the cinema one February night in 1986. "You might say that he devoted his career," Brown writes, "to ensuring that no Swede would ever need to experience the American combination of material poverty and boundless optimism, and that he succeeded so completely that when he died he left a country where no one was poor and no one had room for optimism."

Brown argues that what happened amounted to a collective loss of self-belief, caused by affluence. Influential Swedes, he suggests, looked at the concrete and glass paradise they had built, and wondered what it was for. Some seem even unsure that it can survive at all. "Whether prosperity can survive without the memories and disciplines of poverty is a question I don't know the answer to," is the way he puts it.

When James Boswell tried to get round Dr Johnson's reluctance to visit Ireland, he asked him whether it wasn't at least worth going to see the Giant's Causeway. "Worth seeing," replied Johnson. "But not worth going to see." I felt even less enthusiastic about taking a trip to Sweden. But by the end of Andrew Brown's enticingly written account of his journey to the north of the country, I wanted to see it for myself.